verrinon

I think the hardest thing we all have ahead of us is seperating this game from D&D. While PE plans to emulate the old infinity engine games, which mostly use D&D rules from some edition or another, it is it's own game. And a fantasy game at that! And should have its own rules and ideas... atleast to protect against infringing on someone elses IP lol. I think, as is also mentioned by someone above, that fun and playability should be the main deciding factor in developing weapons, armor, and other gear, not "realism." Being a fantasy game it can be whatever we want it to be! When talking "Historically," we still want well known items to do what we would expect them to do (ex. basic Plate armor > basic cloth without dex modifiers, Halberd does high damage but is relatively slow, arrow > chain mail )... But getting into the nitty gritty of hide vs leather, or dealing slashing with a short sword vs piercing isnt super important. Who's to say that a certain culture doesn't just plain make better versions of common items like dwarven plate or elven chain... Or having an weapon made from a better, fictional, metal wouldnt hold a stronger or sharper edge or be lighter or better balanced. Maybe the (race) of (location) just found a better way to weave cloth or cure hide so it's stonger or stiffer or just doesnt fall apart easily. This would stop the race to plate mail and give players the ability to stay with an armor style they liked, like banded, without feeling dumb for choising the "obviously better" plate. Maybe I want my guy to be kinda samurai looking and full plate just doesnt fit. Id much rather stick to character and get banded style mail that was expertly crafted and offers the same protection as plate to some degree. Also, as kinda a side note, I really like being able to "color" your gear!!! I mostly play the "Paladin" archtype and I hate when the "best" gear is totally out of character. Thanks to Mods, my paladin style Skyrim character doesnt have to look like an evil barbarian in Dragon plate or Daedric.... I sat in Dwarven gear until lv 40 just cause it was the most "Holy" looking gear I could get. Guild Wars color customization, or even transmogrification in WOW, is a great way to get your character to look a certain way but still gear up and be bad@$$

I always liked the ability to distribute my points the way i see fit in an RPG... To some extent. Rolling and rolling over and over and hoping for that perfect roll can get time consuming and annoying. But I liked the "Every ability score starts at 8 and you have xx points to distrubute among them." Sometimes these were further restricted by allowing only a certain ammount of points to be added into one score to prevent min-maxing, or hard capping skills by race/class/gender. But sometimes I just want that rock headed meat shield with an 8 INT and 18/00 STR. And I also liked how some games allowed your ability scores to go up after a few levels by a point. This could also be restriced by only allowing you to put points into a stat relative to something you've done over those few levels. Ex: You are a mage and hit lv 5 so you now have 1 point to add to an ability score, you've stayed in the back and haven't really been hit at all, or dealt any mele damage, so you can only put that point into int/dex/wis/cha or something. Progression in an RPG is at its core. You should either start as that bad @$$ hero with better than average scores, or atleast slowly progress to the stuff of legends. Grabing a bunch of magical gear and having buffed stats is something any peasant could do if they happend to find your gear laying in an unsecured chest. YOU are the hero because of YOU, not just what you bought/found/stole. And when making or leveling a character you want a degree of control over the randomness of a dice roll. PLUSSSS then there is no "mine is better than yours," only "mine is different than yours."